Prologue.
January 31, 2025.
3 years, 3 long years since the release of Sword Art Online. It was probably the biggest game release of it's time, and unfortunately it was the biggest video game tragedy as well. I remember getting one of the rare hard copies when it was released, in fact I got the last one at the game store I went to. If it were not for my ignorant boss I had as a waiter, I too would have been stuck in that game of death. He expected me to grovel at his feet for that and shortly after I threw a customer's food in his face and left. My best friend was stuck in that game, and and by the grace of God he made it back. I took him out to dinner to our favorite restaurant when we were kids, to spoil him and stuff like that, for old time's sake. He explained that while the world of Aincrad was dangerous and on the first day everyone was afraid of dying, that same dangerous world was breathtakingly beautiful. A part of me wished I could have seen it myself.
As the wave of nostalgia hit us so did something else, He mentioned that we onced wanted to develop a game of our own. We both decided of all things, it needed to be a VRMMO. Since something called the World Seed was previously released that allowed you to create your own Virtual World I had already started working on a massive project but wanted to surprise him. Something pried at the back of my mind. Yes the World Seed was a fantastic gift by a person guised under the name Kirito, who eventually was the hero of Sword Art Online, but for the project I had in mind, it was nowhere near enough data I needed. Fate yielded my reward, as my friend was exceptionally talented in this field of Computer science. He looked it over a few days ago and was able to do something amazing, the Seed exploded into something more with a few extra algorithms thrown in. Instead of a single world. It could generate much, much more. After paying him nearly $200 I made him repeat the process again, and again. Each one of these new seeds were different and creating more than just worlds, new NPC's were generated and not just human, probably over 100 new species of NPC's were made as well. He also added a randomizing engine that He designed when he was younger. Of all things it helped us study for school by randomly generating questions for a chosen subject. The guy was a wiz to say the least, there was really only one problem, The Game entirely would be massive, taking nearly half a Terabyte of data just to run, thankfully Computer's now can hold such massive programs. I designed the game to be very much different from what was popular today, such as Alfheim Online and Sword Art Online were fantasy games, we both decided to focus heavily on the Sci-Fi genre and spent months studying on the sciences of astronomy, and that the story would be a player's main objective to beat the game. Yes they are oddball choices but with just how big this game will be, it will be worth it. After I explained everything the next time we met afterwards, my friend was on board and fell in love with the idea.
We have everything the connections, the money, the will, the story, only one thing was left, a name. My friend came up with it and the slogan for when we would release the game privately. and it was fabulous. I would take a few days to myself and create a Teaser Trailer for the game and when only a month remained a full trailer of the game would be released sharing only the bare minimum. The game will be bigger than any VRMMO will ever be and thanks to my father who runs a shipping company we can ship it worldwide. The player wont have just a single world to explore. Now? They have a whole Galaxy with thousands, no Millions of planets and stars to explore and a pretty catchy slogan... A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….
~Dante Russo